Morning. ♥️

I’m sitting in a pool of sunlight, watching dark red cherries bleed into a bowl of oatmeal and trails of steam pirouette up from my coffee as I think about how life feels right now.

About outgrowing spaces, facing uncertainty, and what to remember when preparing for all outcomes.

FACING GRADUATION: THE BUZZ

Only a few weeks of classes are left and it’s all that I can do to take note of everything. People around me are buzzing over their spring schedules, comparing classes, divulging gossip on this professor and that one. You would think that it would be weird, that I would feel that I am missing out.

But I don’t.

In a masochistic manner, I did look at the classes being offered next semester, expecting all kinds of crazy courses that I would be so sad to never get to take, but all I saw were the ephemeral classes of yesteryear, repackaged for someone new. Someone that is not me.

I’ve already taken each and every one of them. I suppose that would be obvious. I suppose that that is what one assumes accompanies graduation.

But it only just hit me right then that there is nothing left here for me. That the only thing I have left to do is leave. And how sad can that really be when staying doesn’t offer anything anymore?

EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN

When I was a kid, I always wanted to observe a dance class or a soccer practice before deciding to join it myself. I wanted to know exactly what I was getting into, and I wanted to know it before I had skin in the game.

If it looked alright, I would pull on the tights or the shin guards and wade into that vulnerable space of participation. But if it didn’t, I could leave. There would be no unknowns, no surprises, if I could help it. I wanted everything to be illuminated by blinding light.

But the older I got, the darker the paths grew. More faith was required. I had to leap with without always knowing what the ground would feel like, or if it would catch me at all.

I had to learn to step into things without understanding them, and to be okay with the prickly sensation of learning it all along the way. I think that taught me grace, but really, it showed me the beauty of the unknown, of venturing into worlds I knew nothing about.

Or, the human spirit.

LIFE TRANSITIONS AS BLACK HOLES

We were talking about black holes in my one of my classes the other day when my professor started waxing poetic about how humanity is so obsessed with them because they are one of the things that we know almost nothing about.

They are the enigmas of our intergalactic minds, sucking us into them with a force that can only be chalked up to the lethal curiosity of being a human being. The abyss is terrifying, and we love it for that. We can’t ever know what lurks within in. We can’t observe it from a distance. We can’t experience it secondhand. There is no standing on the sidelines and taking notes before deciding to step inside. You have to fall. You have to stare into it accept it’s enigmatic nature.

Graduating college feels a lot like staring into that black hole. You know nothing, but you want to know everything.

A SWEET REMINDER

I read this quote the other day that was so sweet and gentle that it felt like the hand of a friend holding mine. It read:

“As you prepare for all possible outcomes, may you also remember to prepare for positive outcomes too. May you prepare yourself for good memories, good lessons, and all of the little places where sunlight will come shining through.”

–MHN

It’s such a simple concept, but one that felt brand new. We’re so used to using cynicism as a shield that we forget to remember that good things are allowed to happen to. When we’re kids, we know how to feel joy and hope. We have not yet learned disappointment or felt the wrath of embarrassment, so we don’t constantly try to sever all of their possible catalysts. We know how to be happy.

But then we grow up and find ourselves reading something like this and realize how far we have gotten from that sweet state. When did “reality” obtain a negative connotation, the perverse underbelly of our dreams?

Reality holds lovely things too.

I’m trying to remember this. I’m trying to remember as I undergo this huge life transition to also prepare for the possibility of joy. Of love. Of good things that I don’t know the faces of yet.

Because it’s a lot.

It’s a lot to leave a place and jump blindly into a new world that you have never known.

PERCEPTION

For I only just started college yesterday and somewhere between now and then, I outgrew the one space that felt infinite.

I remember my first semester on campus, walking around, all I could think about was how massive everything looked. I remember writing in my journal about how big everything seemed. The buildings towered over me, unfamiliarity making everything so much larger than it perhaps ever was.

For those buildings don’t seem so large and labyrinthian anymore. Kind of like how this city doesn’t feel so endless anymore either. You keep growing and all of the things you thought would be able to contain you forever start to feel like boa constrictors around your neck, threatening to sever your life if you don’t escape their embrace.

It starts in your mother’s belly, then her arms, your house. Just going up the block used to feel like traversing planets.

But then you get on that plane alone for the first time and you watch your world grow so tiny that you can’t believe that is is the only one that you have ever known and suddenly you are so claustrophobic. You’re starving, ravenous, reaching out in the dark for places that you never knew existed.

I hope that life is always stained with an element of that hunger.

Happy Sunday.

Love, m.

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